Long term evolution (LTE) and other radio communications technologies can require significant infrastructure and configuration. Generally, network operators test various aspects of their network equipment to ensure reliable and efficient operation. Network operators typically simulate various conditions before equipment is deployed in a live network to decrease avoidable delays and/or other problems.
Various technical specifications, such as the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Technical Specifications 36.212 V11.0.0 (2012-09), the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, define data formats for LTE communications. Generally, data from the network to a user device is referred to as downlink data and data from the user device to the network is referred to as uplink data. For example, a user device or user equipment (UE), such as a cellular mobile phone or tablet computer, may communicate with an enhanced or evolved Node B (eNode B) via the cellular radio transmission link. Data that is sent from the eNode B to the UE is downlink data, and data that is sent from the UE to the eNode B is uplink data.
Uplink and downlink data may include separate channels defined in the physical layer of the protocol stack, herein referred to as “physical channels.” Uplink and downlink data may be transmitted using one or more multiplexing and/or modulation schemes. For example, in some LTE networks, downlink data is transmitted using an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and uplink data is transmitted using single carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA). Such schemes may allow multiple streams of data to be sent simultaneously (e.g., at different frequencies). While such schemes may allow data to be communicated at high-speed, significant processing is required to encode and decode the data. For example, a UE may perform channel coding, multiplexing, and interleaving of data and control streams, which are then sent to the eNode B over the air (RF) interface. After pre-processing the received signal from the UE, the eNode B may perform channel delineation for uplink physical channels and/or other baseband processing. After separating LTE data from various physical layer channels, the LTE data may be further processed.
During uplink processing, the data transmitted via the physical channels may be processed. One physical channel processed during uplink processing may be a physical uplink shared channel (PUSCH) and may include control information, such as a channel quality indicator (CQI), a precoding matrix indicator (PMI), a rank indication (RI), and a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) acknowledgements (ACKs). Various factors or configuration parameters may affect the format or configuration of the uplink channel, including any control information that may be stored therein. As such, decoding the uplink channel and identifying control information therein may be problematic if the configuration of the actual UE or UEs that transmitted the data over the uplink channel is not known. For example, one method for verifying the decoding of data transmitted over the uplink channel is to manually input the configuration for each UE that transmitted on the uplink channel during a given time interval. Such manual UE configuration is time, consuming and may not be possible if the actual configuration of the UEs that transmitted over the uplink channel is not known.
Accordingly, in light of these difficulties, a need exists for improved methods, systems, and computer readable media for automatically decoding uplink data